


How We Find Our Way: The Journey (so far!) of Michael Burnham

by kira_katrine



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Character Analysis, Family, Friendship, Gen, Meta, Spoilers for basically everything, Trauma, mentions of Burnham/Tyler, mentions of most of the other major characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-15
Updated: 2020-05-15
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:48:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24206161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kira_katrine/pseuds/kira_katrine
Summary: Written for Meta Manifesto 2020.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 7
Collections: Meta Manifesto 2020 Fest





	How We Find Our Way: The Journey (so far!) of Michael Burnham

Michael Burnham (played by Sonequa Martin-Green) is the main protagonist of Star Trek Discovery, one of seven live-action television shows that currently belong to the Star Trek franchise. As of this writing, two seasons of Discovery have aired, with a third in the works. The first two seasons are set roughly ten years before Star Trek’s original series, and a few characters from that show make appearances in this one—Michael is actually Spock’s adopted older sister, despite being fully human herself. She is the first woman of color to be the central character of a Star Trek series, and (at least so far) the first Trek protagonist who has yet to be a captain at any point.

She starts off as first officer of the USS Shenzhou, serving under Captain Philippa Georgiou. With training in quantum physics and xenoanthropology, Michael is described as one of the most well-regarded first officers in Starfleet. But in the very first episode of the series, she makes a bad decision that results in her being stripped of her rank and sentenced to life in prison. She then ends up on the USS Discovery, fighting in a war she is blamed for starting, and ultimately getting the chance to restore her career, find a new family in the Discovery’s crew, learn new things about herself, and save the soul of the Federation.

And that’s all just season 1. After that, she has to confront her past when reunited with her estranged adoptive brother and, later, her presumed-dead biological mother, and in doing so save the Federation again. And going forward, she will have to confront an unknown future in which much of what she’s always known is gone.

‘either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly’: on stories and where she came from

The earliest glimpse we get into Michael’s life comes in the animated short “The Girl Who Made the Stars.” In this, Michael is seen as a young child, afraid of the dark. Her father is able to calm her down by telling her the titular story, an African legend about a little girl who put the stars into the night sky and in doing so saved her people. This girl does not take no for an answer, or sit back and wait for someone else to find a solution to the problem they face—she goes out and does it herself, despite being afraid. And when she encounters an alien being the likes of which she’s never before imagined, so the story goes, “she wasn’t scared. She was curious.” The next we see of Michael as a child, in a flashback to the day her biological parents died, we see that she is in some ways the same as that little girl. She too is intensely curious, reading books on space phenomena and begging her parents to let her watch a star go supernova. As an adult, we see this continue to be true. We also see her insistent on finding her own solutions and doing things she believes will save people, even over the objections of others.

After her parents are murdered in a Klingon attack, Michael is adopted by Sarek of Vulcan and his human wife, Amanda. Not long after she goes to live with them, Amanda also gets the idea to try to help Michael by telling her a story. The story she chooses is Alice in Wonderland. This story is referenced several more times throughout the show, with Michael reciting a passage to herself as she flees from danger during a mission and later quoting it to Spock in an attempt to reach him.

Alice, unlike the girl who made the stars, does not actively choose to set out on her adventure. Alice _falls_.

And much the same way, Michael is pulled away from everything she has ever known by forces beyond her control. In its place, she finds a world which she does not entirely understand, and which is not entirely understanding of her. She finds a world that plays by different rules than the ones she’s known, rules its inhabitants call logic, but which to her seem like nonsense at first. But unlike Alice, there is no dream for Michael to wake up from. She has to adapt to Vulcan’s rules.

She spends much of her time on Vulcan feeling like an outsider—a feeling which isn’t exactly discouraged by the existence of a violent xenophobic movement that tries to blow up her school at one point. She is rejected by her classmates. She breaks down one day while trying to answer questions in school about the very attack in which her parents were killed, and Sarek’s response is to tell her that her “human heart” is holding her back. Her completely normal response to a seriously traumatic event is treated as a character flaw on her part.

Still, in many ways she is successful at assimilating into Vulcan society, to the point where she becomes disconnected from her humanity. But then, she is rejected from the Vulcan Expeditionary Group, and ends up joining Starfleet instead, returning to live among humans while still trying to live Vulcan ideals. Just before she learns this, Amanda gives her a graduation present—a copy of Alice in Wonderland, which she takes with her on her journey into yet another world where she isn’t sure she belongs.

‘it can only be what it is, and not what you want it to be’: on who she became

According to Martin-Green, this feeling of being an outsider was a big part of the reason why Michael ultimately chose to become a xenoanthropologist.1 By the time she joins Starfleet and begins serving on the USS Shenzhou, she is already used to learning another culture and trying to fit in. Indeed, when she believes she and Captain Georgiou are trapped on the Crepusculan homeworld, that is her first suggestion for how to survive. In that same episode, we see her fascinated by the carvings on the Klingon beacon. 

As a scientist and as someone raised on Vulcan, Michael often starts out trying to approach situations rationally. In a group, she is often the one pointing out that they don’t have enough information to draw a particular conclusion about something they’re investigating. She also occasionally approaches things as a scientist when it would be more appropriate to treat them as regular interpersonal interactions, such as when she tries to explain Saru’s own behavior back to him by saying that his culture trains him to be on the lookout for enemies and only succeeds in offending him.

At the same time, she is also quite empathetic towards alien beings she encounters, most notably with the tardigrade the Discovery crew nicknames ‘Ripper.’ In discussing Ripper, Michael, despite her Vulcan background, is not the one dismissing the importance of ‘feelings’; it is Lorca and Landry who do that, being more interested in the tardigrade’s possible use to them in the war. Michael calls them out: “You judge the creature by its appearance, and by one single incident from its past.” Later, she is the first to suspect that using Ripper to pilot the spore drive is harming the creature, and this distresses her to the point where she has nightmares of herself in the tardigrade’s place. While Ripper is presented as somewhat analogous to Michael herself, and the way the rest of the crew treats her early on, her empathy for the alien is not new; when the crew of the Shenzhou first discovers the Klingon artifact, her first response before having any idea what it is, is “Maybe it’s lost. Maybe it’s afraid to show us its whole self.” Of course, one notable exception to this occurs right after: her insistence on firing on the Klingons first. This is an intentional exception to the typical rule of her worldview.

She is also, as she puts it in the first episode of season 2, “not uncomfortable with risk.” In the pilot, she immediately offers to go into a dangerous, radioactive area of space to investigate a mysterious object, saying that “being afraid of everything means you learn nothing.” In later episodes we see her force Mudd to reset the time loop by eating a dark matter pod that has been described as one of the most painful ways to die, bring the former Terran emperor back into the prime universe, break Spock out of Section 31 and decide to go to Talos IV despite knowing nothing about it, use herself as bait for the Red Angel and almost die in the process, and try to go off and track down Control by herself, among other things.

She is very much an action-oriented person, which makes sense for the protagonist of the kind of show that Discovery is. In the episode “Point of Light,” she jumps at the chance to help Tilly with her spore-ghost problem rather than spend any more time thinking about her own dysfunctional family situation, saying “I need a problem I can solve.” In the first season, Tilly points out to her that the fact that she doesn’t have as many duties as she’s used to gives her time to process everything she’s going through. In the second season, Spock accuses her of insisting on shouldering every burden—which manifests as trying to save everyone and fix everything—because it is easier for her than dealing with what she’s lost. She wants to be able to do something about bad situations she deals with, not just spend time talking about it.

She actually isn’t so bad at talking with other people about _their_ feelings, though; it’s mainly her own that she has trouble with. On several occasions, we see her trying to help Ash deal with his trauma. When she learns about what happened to him in the Klingon prison, she isn’t scared away by his obvious emotionality; instead, she tries to reassure him. Even after he turns out to be Voq and they (sort of?) break up, she keeps in touch with him and tries to help with the problems he encounters as the Klingon torchbearer. When she finds out about his and L’Rell’s son, she doesn’t get upset about that either—only says she wished he’d told her so she could have helped him sooner. And yet she is reluctant throughout the first season, and to a lesser extent into the second, to talk about her own feelings or past with him or anyone else. She reveals some things about her childhood on Vulcan when it becomes directly relevant to solving a concrete problem—saving Sarek’s life—in episode 6. Getting together with Ash in the first place also takes it being relevant to saving the ship. But in the absence of any such thing, when she’s asked about personal things in her life, she often tries to deflect and talk about the other person instead.

‘isik for your thoughts?’: on logic, emotion, and the wisdom to know the difference

At one point in the first season, Michael uses the expression ‘isik for your thoughts?’ She admits she isn’t actually sure what an isik is, but it’s assumed that it’s some Vulcan thing. Other characters pick up the expression, but no one knows what it actually means. In the season 1 finale, Amanda uses it, and mentions that it’s something her mother used to say. It turned out to be human in origin.

Similarly, after her mutiny on the Shenzhou, Michael finds herself questioning her own motivations. “Was it logical? Emotional? I don’t know,” she says. When she originally made that decision, she insisted it was the former. It was a Vulcan tactic, she said. Fire on the Klingons first and earn their respect. She insisted this had absolutely nothing to do with her past trauma at the hands of Klingons, and that she wasn’t being emotional, while clearly becoming more and more agitated. And after she lost Georgiou—a mother figure to her, just as she had already lost her biological parents to the Klingons—she killed T’Kuvma, the exact thing she had said before they should not do because it would make him a martyr. By the time she is at her court hearing, being sentenced to life in prison, she knows she made the wrong choice, but she’s not yet sure why.

(There are also definitely some parallels between her and Voq in this episode—they’re both shown as outcasts, orphans, rejected by those around them. They both lose the people they look up to most in the same battle, and are blamed for it by those around them. And they were both only one thing--Michael human, Voq Klingon—until they each experienced something very traumatic, and became another thing as well.)

She arrives on the Discovery, and she is an outsider once again. Everyone blames her for the war, even her fellow prisoners. She is constantly thinking about what happened in that first battle of the war, and remembers the exact number of dead. When her transport ship is nearly destroyed, and everyone is panicking around her, she just sits, doing nothing, not caring if she lives or dies. She is completely resigned to spending the rest of her days in prison, and at first doesn’t even want to join the Discovery’s crew, believing she doesn’t deserve even that much freedom. But Lorca insists, and she stays. 

She still doesn’t want to make friends. She certainly doesn’t want to make friends with her new roommate, Cadet Sylvia Tilly. Tilly talks constantly, while Michael is more reserved. Tilly “loves feeling feelings,” while Michael would rather not talk about hers. But perhaps most of all, Tilly makes it very clear from day one that she wants Michael to teach her to be a better Starfleet officer, with the goal of becoming a starship captain one day. She sees Michael as she was, one of the most respected first officers in the fleet, and Michael doesn’t see herself that way.

Eventually, she does start to let the Discovery crew into her life, and they do the same for her. When a party is held onboard the ship, she decides to attend, despite not having much experience with such things. “I wish sorely to step out of my comfort zone,” she says, “but don’t know how.” That night (when she’s not stopping a time-traveling criminal from murdering the entire crew and selling off the ship), she learns about the importance of honesty in relationships from Stamets and even starts a romance of her own with Ash Tyler. During her days on the ship, she also starts mentoring Tilly, helping her get into better physical shape. When they’re in the mirror universe, and Tilly has to impersonate the evil Captain Killy, Michael helps her get into character, telling her that Terran ‘strength’ really comes from fear and desperation. Prime universe Tilly, though, has something better and more real. “You have the strength of an entire crew that believes in you,” Michael tells her.

(When the Discovery crew find themselves in the mirror universe, and Michael has to pose as her mirror self, she finds herself having to adapt to a new culture once again. She even approaches it a bit like an anthropology expedition, studying everything she can on the Terrans and their society. Unlike primeverse Michael, an outsider seemingly wherever she goes, mirrorverse Michael is a captain who seems to be very respected by her crew—although, as this is the mirror universe, that doesn’t stop them from trying to murder her every chance they get. “Can you bury your heart?” she asks in the beginning of ‘The Wolf Inside’—well, she ought to know the answer to that. She spent years trying to bury that human heart of hers. “It’s getting easier to pass—which is exactly what I’m most afraid of.” She knows both how easy and how hard it is to assimilate into another culture when it surrounds you. She still can’t always tell her human impulses from her Vulcan logic—she doesn’t want to think about that kind of confusion between Federation and Terran Empire, if she was trapped there long enough.)

She also starts to learn just how… not normal much of her upbringing was. When she explains to Tilly that Sarek often treated her a bit like an experiment, to show that humans and Vulcans could coexist, Tilly seems shocked. “How could he put that kind of pressure on a child?” she says (and this is coming from Tilly, who doesn’t have the greatest relationship with the one parent of hers we’ve seen herself). Michael also learns that something she’s believed for years—that her rejection from the Vulcan Expeditionary Group was because she just wasn’t good enough—was never really true. In reality, it came down to Sarek choosing to allow Spock to go instead of her, because they were only willing to accept one not-full-Vulcan. Sarek, and Vulcans in general, are just as fallible as anybody. ‘Logic’ as they practice it isn’t the be-all-to-end-all either.

But the lesson isn’t that logic is bad, or that emotion is foolish, or anything of the kind. The lesson is that logic and emotion both have their place—what’s important is knowing yourself well enough to understand the difference. When Michael brings mirror Georgiou back to the prime universe, she knows she could come up with a ‘logical’ explanation for what she did—but she also knows she won’t try. “The truth is that I couldn’t watch her die again,” she admits. Mirror Georgiou, meanwhile, seems baffled by Michael’s actions at the Battle of the Binary Stars—but not in the way one might think. “You should have killed my counterpart in her ready room and become a hero,” she says. Apart from the fact that that’s just not how anything works in the Federation—murdering one’s superior officer would not be seen as an acceptable thing to do even if it did somehow result in a military victory—that completely overlooks Michael’s reason for doing it in the first place. She was never looking for glory or acclaim. She wanted to _save_ Captain Georgiou and the crew of the Shenzhou. “You instigate valiantly, then second-guess,” mirror Georgiou says, meaning it as an insult—but second-guessing, thinking things through before you do them, certainly has its place.

From the beginning, Michael is clear on her belief in Federation values and in what those values are. Early in her time on Discovery, she tells Lorca that she has no intention of helping him develop an illegal weapon, saying that “it is by the principles of the United Federation of Planets that I live, and by them I will most certainly die.” She never changes her mind on that. The problem is that sometimes this worldview is overshadowed by the effects of trauma that she was never really able to properly deal with. When Captain Georgiou tells her that Starfleet does not fire first, Michael’s response is “We have to!” Not “actually they do, so long as conditions XYZ are met.” Not “but don’t you think we really should, as a general rule?” No, this one time, _we have to_. This one time, because Klingons are different from anything else the Federation faces. Anyone who watches Star Trek knows that starships regularly encounter aggressive, dangerous and even incomprehensible beings in space. Why are the Klingons alone an exception? Over the later part of the season, her view on them is complicated by her interactions with Ash Tyler—or, as he was once known, Voq. She starts out seeing him as someone who’s like her in a way—someone struggling with his past, who sometimes isn’t able to approach situations rationally because of it. And then, it turns out that the things he told her about were false memories, that he is himself the enemy. And yet, Ash *is* traumatized. He really did experience those flashbacks and those emotions. And now that he knows the truth, he chooses to side with Michael, to work towards peace. Everything is more complicated than it seems. Later, when Michael visits Qo’nos, she sees Klingons just going about their daily lives, not so different from humans after all. She starts to rethink even their original plan, which involved attacking only military targets, and wanting some better way.

In ‘The War Without, The War Within,’ Michael confronts Ash over everything that’s happened between them. She tells him that she can’t be with him anymore, that Voq’s actions—and some of Ash’s actions—hurt her too much. He doesn’t take it well—he doesn’t know how he can deal with everything that’s going on with him without her help. She tries to give him some advice to take with him. “After the Battle of the Binary Stars, I was so lost,” Michael tells him. “I had to sit with myself. I had to work through it. I had to crawl my way back. I’m still not there, but I’m trying.”

Of course Michael hasn’t finished working through everything that’s happened to her—but she’s acknowledging that this is a journey she’s on.

‘there are more things in heaven and earth’: on responsibility and leaps of faith

In the second episode of the second season, when Captain Christopher Pike first encounters the mysterious phenomenon he calls the Red Angel, he thinks there must be some deeper meaning behind its presence. He even suggests the possibility of divine intervention, or at least something indistinguishable from it. “They’re not here by accident,” he says of the New Eden residents, descended from those originally brought to the planet by the angel. By contrast, Michael (after taking a little while to even be sure the angel is real rather than a hallucination) doesn’t want to “assign motivation” to it. When she, the captain, and Owosekun go down to New Eden, Michael sets out to prove that these people were not saved by some “miracle,” but by something that can be explained by science. This fits in well with the first season, in which she said she didn’t believe in fate, but that “I’m responsible for forging my own path. We all are.”

Just what Michael is responsible for comes up over and over again in this season. In her view, the answer seems to be… an awful lot. To be fair, part of this is a result of other people telling her that—blaming herself for the Klingon War and for Captain Georgiou’s death is a conclusion she likely would have come to on her own, but it surely didn’t help that almost the whole Federation seemed to agree, or that Starfleet deemed her actions in the Battle of the Binary Stars worthy of a lifelong prison sentence. There’s also the death of her biological parents—she believes that if only she hadn’t insisted on staying on Doctari Alpha to see the supernova, they wouldn’t have been there when the Klingons attacked. This, of course, is not logical at all—how was she, at the age of nine, supposed to have predicted that the Klingons would show up?—but after all, she’s not clinging quite as hard to logic now as she was in the first season, and that leaves room for these thoughts to more easily sneak in. She’s having to actually deal with all kinds of things that her Vulcan discipline might have helped her put aside somewhat, up to now.

Perhaps most central to this second season, though, is an incident that happened between her and Spock when they were both children. This is something she hasn’t spoken of to anyone else, but which has been at the center of the decades-long rift between her and Spock that’s been alluded to before. Eventually it is revealed that, after the bombing of her school and her near-death experience, Michael became convinced that her presence was putting her new family in danger, and decided to run away from home. When Spock tried to follow her, she turned on him, saying all the things she knew would hurt him most because she thought that, to save his life, she had to push him away. It worked a bit too well. She rescues Spock from Section 31 and takes him to Talos IV, where in exchange for helping him, the Talosians force the two of them to relive the memory of what happened between them back then. Still, after all these years, he’s not ready to forgive her. He can’t hear her new insistence that his human side was a thing to be proud of, when she couldn’t even believe that about herself until so recently. She can’t hear his declaration that “failure is liberating” when in her experience, failure means the deaths of the people she cares about.

And then, a Control-infected Airiam demands that Michael send her out an airlock, that her death is the only thing that will stop the deaths of not only the Discovery crew but every sentient life-form in the galaxy. Pike, over the comm channel, agrees that it has to be done, and orders Michael to comply. But she can’t do it, can’t let herself be the cause of any more death. She insists there has to be another way. She’s back in the mindset of fear and desperation, and she’s once again ignoring an order from her captain and insisting she knows a way to save everyone. It’s not about Klingons this time—she’s moved past blaming the Klingons, and on to blaming herself. And Airiam’s last words—“everything is because of you”—confirm everything she’d already been thinking. So when, not much later, she learns that the Red Angel is not an alien being, not a divine presence, but a future version of herself, *that* is an explanation that makes sense.

…Except that when Michael finally comes face-to-face with the Red Angel, and learns its identity, that’s not what she sees at all. The Red Angel is her biological mother, Dr. Gabrielle Burnham, astrophysicist, Section 31 operative and, apparently, time traveler. It is not divine, but human—determination and ingenuity and most of all, a mother’s love, watching over Michael throughout her life and, on occasion, stepping in to protect her from harm. She knew about the threat posed to the galaxy by Control, and spent years searching for a way to prevent the apocalyptic future she’d seen…

Only that’s not quite all of it either. Gabrielle, like Michael, is only human, and she can’t do everything all alone any more than her daughter can. She won’t accept that, though. She won’t even speak to Michael at first, only wanting to be sent back and allowed to continue her seemingly endless journey through space and time. She too is sure she’s the only person who can save everything, and is shutting everyone else out, even her own daughter. Michael may not have actually met her future self that day, but in Gabrielle, she sees what she might become if she continues down the path she’s on.

When Michael learns that she will have to complete Gabrielle’s mission after all, things are very different the second time around. Instead of facing death alone, she plans to travel to the future in which Gabrielle has been living. And when the rest of the Discovery crew learns of this plan, they insist on accompanying her as well—proving correct her statement from the season premiere, that not a single member of that crew would abandon a fellow officer. The mysterious signals the Red Angel left prove to be another way for Michael to reach for people, as she tells Spock, who have roles to play in the story—Reno, Siranna, Po. They need Pike to retrieve the time crystal, Tilly to befriend the queen of Xahea, Ash to go to the Klingons and the Kelpiens and ask for their help. Even mirror Georgiou gets an opportunity to do what she does best. They need just about everyone to construct a new time suit and to steer Discovery through the battle with the Section 31 fleet. This was never, ever a task that one person could have done alone, could have been responsible for.

Because the Red Angel was never one person or one being of any kind. “It’s your mother, and it’s you,” Spock says to Michael. “Trust what you’ve done together.” As Pike suggested at the beginning, Michael did need to learn to have faith—but not in the divine. She ends the season with a literal leap of faith nine hundred years into the future, of faith in herself and her own abilities, in her mother who made this all possible, in her crew following behind her and protecting her throughout. And looking forward, that’s how it will continue to be. She’ll reunite with the crew in this new unknown world, and possibly with her mother as well. She will, according to the trailer we’ve seen, become a symbol of hope for the future—but she’ll need hope of her own. And in her friends, in her family, she’ll find it.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Source: https://deadline.com/2018/05/star-trek-discovery-sonequa-martin-green-interview-news-1202385551/ Back


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